Acrobat 3D 8 Preview on my iMac
I’ve got a confession to make. At home my primary work machine is an iMac. And I am very happily running Acrobat 3D 8 Preview using both Bootcamp and Parallels under Win XP.
It is definitely a cool thing. For standard models that don’t absolutely need hardware acceleration for manipulation, performance under Parallels is very good. When I need to do something that mandates hardware acceleration or if I need to use 3D capture to bring in model formats that are not natively supported in Acrobat 3D 8, I switch to BootCamp (This enables me to use the built in OpenGL hardware needed for the 3D Capture application).
Why is this great? Beyond all of the industrial designers, 3D modelers, CAD developers and architects that primarily use a Mac, there are a huge number of technical writers/illustrators that are only Mac users. Since a Mac version of Acrobat 3D 8 has not been announced, the BootCamp or Parallel options makes the 3D PDF creation and editing technology available to an important audience.
As an aside, it also offers Mac users a very powerful CAD translator, letting them bring in almost any CAD or modeling file format and convert it to STEP, IGES, Parasolid or VRML.
